Author's comments

I've started to post artist comments when it seems like the comment clarifies or explains something about the picture (or when they're particularly odd). Is this something that people care about? Would you like to see more author's comments on pictures, or is it just unnecessary noise?

For reference, post #150856 & post #151052

It's a very good practice, and I support it by all means.

Excellent idea. Please keep doing it.

Also, tag them with something too. I would definitely enjoy going through posts that feature that type of commentary, even if the picture at hand doesn't interest me that much.

It can be useful; I think I've translated comments a few times, on request - or had to track them down to figure out what something in the picture was supposed to mean. Speaking of which, it would be a big help if there were two separate source fields: one for the image itself, and one for the page where it appears (and which holds the comments, presumably). You can usually track down the latter from the former, but it's bothersome.

http://cart.donmai.us/ticket/259

Those separate source fields are a great ide, but I am afraid they will be left blank most of the time.

I just added comments for some Sailor Moon scans.

Those source fields were a great help. Not all people can read Japanese characters and when they upload something from a Japanese artist site, they can't fill up the artist tag because they can't read profile pages. Those who can read them can just go to the site and get the artist name from there or they can use the "find artist" feature.

So even if you don't know the artist, at least fill the source fields up. Or you can just use danbooruup.

LaC said:
Speaking of which, it would be a big help if there were two separate source fields: one for the image itself, and one for the page where it appears (and which holds the comments, presumably).

That seems like it would be a whole lot more trouble than it's worth, especially since a lot of comments are in blogs, which rotate, or menu pics, which will disappear in time. Anyway, much of the time the comments aren't that useful.

Also, too many specialized boxes lead to confusion about where to put what.

Edit: Quess, we weren't really talking about that.

kumarei said: That seems like it would be a whole lot more trouble than it's worth, especially since a lot of comments are in blogs, which rotate, or menu pics, which will disappear in time. Anyway, much of the time the comments aren't that useful.

I'm inclined to agree, sort of. It's not that it's a bad idea, but it'd be a lot of work. You couldn't even necessarily automate it because of reasons you pointed out.

I know danbooruup is able to use the parent page for an image (cycle through the available source URLs it grabs) and so coult automate to a degree, but most of the time that means you'll get the top page of a gallery, or main page of a blog, or maybe a later 'page' in the listing that over time will no longer contain the same images as more are added.

One thing that happened for a little while was, at least for blog-format sites, linking the specific entry. But you can't really automate that in the same way.

Then an artist shifts sites and all the old links are rendered dead anyway =P

So I don't know, but getting back to the initial post, yes, by all means translate the artists' comments if they add something substantial to the understanding of the image. I often scour these comments myself for clues when I'm unfamiliar with a character, and I've gotten pretty good at tracking stuff down, but since I don't *know* know Japanese, it's usually just a mix of the rikaichan extension and the rudimentary basics I did learn, along with familiarity over time of how fanart sites are laid out. That's not enough to help me understand complex commentary on the images, it's just enough to extract a character or series name, usually.

Also, tag them with something too. I would definitely enjoy going through posts that feature that type of commentary, even if the picture at hand doesn't interest me that much.

Yeah, tag them with "commentary" or something similar.

I regularly post things out of an artist's blog, should I copy the post and include it with the image, even if I can't actually translate it myself (just for completion's sake?)

Log said:
I regularly post things out of an artist's blog, should I copy the post and include it with the image, even if I can't actually translate it myself (just for completion's sake?)

Sure. If you're posting a bunch, Do Not Bump would be nice.

Log said:
I regularly post things out of an artist's blog, should I copy the post and include it with the image, even if I can't actually translate it myself (just for completion's sake?)

Even if you can't translate it, posting it means that those of us that can will be able to with minimal effort.

I figured it was better to ask and get approval than to post comments on ~150 images only to get yelled at because half of them are "today for lunch I had ...." due to my complete lack of Japanese knowledge.

I'm afraid that would get out of hand really fast.

LaC said:
I'm afraid that would get out of hand really fast.

As long as he remembers to not bump the comment, I don't see why it would matter.

Fencedude said: As long as he remembers to not bump the comment, I don't see why it would matter.

Well, I can see how it would be a problem. Say someone who *does* know Japanese is going through the 'commentary' tag trying to help, like they do for 'translation_request'. If there are thousands of utterly irrelevant comments to look at, it bloats the tag and makes someone less likely to look through them.

But on the other hand, if you don't add it because you don't know what it says, you also don't know if it's relevant!

Catch-22, I guess.

I didn't tag them with anything yet, partly because I can do it all with a script at the end. I was also trying to think up a way to keep the untranslated comments seperate from the translated ones so as to not clutter that tag with a bunch of garbage.